Economics Happy Hour Podcast

About Economics Happy Hour Podcast

Economics Happy Hour is a podcast where two economics educators talk through current events, teaching, and research over a drink. Conversations are unscripted and focused on how economists actually think about the world and the classroom. www.econhappyhour.com (https://www.econhappyhour.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Matt & Jadrian

Category

business · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Dec 2022

Latest episode

24 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

101 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   24 Sept 2026

   The 1990s Economy: From Recession to Internet Boom

   The 1990s began with a recession that helped make the economy central to the 1992 presidential election. What followed was a long expansion, falling unemployment, and eventually federal budget surpluses. We weigh NAFTA against the rise of the internet as the decade’s most consequential economic change. Along the way, we look at what the dot-com boom built, even after its most famous companies disappeared. In this episode, we talk about: * How the early recession shaped the 1992 election * Why falling unemployment challenged economists’ expectations * NAFTA, budget surpluses, and the internet as contenders for the decade’s defining change * What survived the dot-com boom after companies like Pets.com did not * How new technology changed everyday life and the way people thought about investing If you liked this conversation, you might also enjoy This Week’s Drinks 🍻 Matt went with his trusty Centennial IPA (https://foundersbrewing.com/our-beer/centennial-ipa/): tasty, reasonably priced, and, by his account, an economist’s dream. Jadrian’s first choice was a cider that had been placed a little too close to the ice maker. A quick trip back upstairs led to a Sam Adams Cold Snap (https://www.samueladams.com/our-beers/seasonal/cold-snap) substitute. The replacement was much easier to drink; the plan for the cider was to let it thaw and mix it back together. Name That Stat 📊 We both stayed on theme for this week’s stat, but we went in two wildly different directions. Matt chipped in the market capitalization for one of the dot-com boom’s most famous companies (https://companiesmarketcap.com/pets-dot-com-ipet-holdings/stock-price-history/). Jadrian stuck with the 90s, but went in a completely different direction by highlighting recent survey results showing that Millennials and Gen Z picked the 1990s as the most fashionable decade. Show Notes The U.S. entered the 1990s after a long expansion, with inflation and unemployment well below the painful levels of the early 1980s (https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-inflation). Then came a recession (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession). Despite George H. W. Bush’s popularity after the Gulf War (https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/234971/george-bush-retrospective.aspx), unemployment was on the rise and the economy became a central issue in the 1992 election. “It’s the economy, stupid” captured the political moment (https://politicaldictionary.com/words/its-the-economy-stupid/). After that rough start, the picture changed. Unemployment kept falling through the decade, reaching roughly 4% by its end while inflation stayed low. That combination pushed economists to reconsider an assumption many had learned in class: that unemployment could not remain much below 6% without causing trouble (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/naturalunemployment.asp). So what best defines the decade economically? We put three candidates on the table: NAFTA (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/north-american-free-trade-agreement.asp), federal budget surpluses (https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/how-did-budget-get-balanced-late-1990s), and the dot-com boom (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dotcom-bubble.asp). NAFTA mattered, though its effects extended beyond the 1990s. The surpluses were striking, especially looking back from today. But the internet felt like the strongest answer for its lasting effect on how we live, work, and build businesses. The boom gave us new companies that would eventually vanish (like Pets.com), but the bigger impact was the money poured into internet companies that far exceeded expectations (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul-krugmans-poor-prediction). The investment helped build infrastructure that later businesses could use. The future felt so uncertain at the time: dial-up connections, a household phone line tied up by the computer, and serious predictions that we might all browse the web through our televisions. The stock market had a long climb throughout the 1990s, and reinvesting dividends would have made people a fortune. A lot changed for people living in the 90s, from buying CDs and writing checks to getting a second phone line. There’s more to unpack, so we’ll return in a few weeks with a fresh episode that looks more closely at labor market shifts, how Americans saved and spent, and the decade’s policy choices. What change from the 1990s most reshaped your everyday life? Leave us a comment with the thing you remember noticing at the time. Pop Culture Corner 🍿 Jadrian brought back a favorite Today Show clip where the presenters are trying to make sense of an email address by asking, “What is the internet?” It’s a charming reminder of how unfamiliar something so ordinary now felt in the mid-1990s. Matt gave a shout-out to Linda and Alan’s Yada Yada Yada Econ collection (http://yadayadayadaecon.com/) of Seinfeld clips. His favorite clip comes from the Soup Nazi episode to show how a distinctive product can give a seller some room to charge more. Jadrian’s favorite is the bottle-deposit scheme, where Kramer and Newman discover that a price difference only looks profitable until you account for the cost of getting the bottles to Michigan. Have a question or topic idea? Reply to this email or drop it in the comments! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.econhappyhour.com (https://www.econhappyhour.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   10 Sept 2026

   How did 9/11 Change the Economy?

   Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, we look at a difficult question: can economics help us understand terrorism? We start with Gary Becker’s rational model of crime and Alan Krueger's research to consider the incentives, opportunity costs, and motivations behind terrorist activity. From there, we consider whether 9/11 was a “small” or “large” economic shock, looking at everything from financial markets and travel to government spending, immigration, and consumer behavior. In this episode, we talk about: * Whether the rational-choice framework economists use to study crime can tell us anything useful about terrorism * The case for viewing 9/11 as a relatively small short-run macroeconomic shock, and why that framing needs important context * How fear and uncertainty changed travel, spending, investment, and everyday behavior after the attacks * The longer-run economic consequences, including security and defense spending, immigration policy, health effects, and changes in government If you liked this conversation, you might also enjoy This Week’s Drinks 🍻 Jadrian took a chance on a Boardwalk Orange Creamsicle (https://www.totalwine.com/beer/seltzers-flavored-beverages/flavored-malt-beverages/boardwalk-orange-creamsicle/p/2126214372?srsltid=AfmBOoooiQVukFVToRU6ouu7K0F7pu3H8Gi2i75yzZnhDDlUlwnVo2-8) that looked promising in the can and became much less promising as soon as it hit the glass. The smell was...not great. Fortunately, it tasted better than it smelled. Matt kept things simple with a light Moscow Mule (https://www.liquor.com/recipes/moscow-mule-cocktail-recipe/). The drinks arrived amid the usual beginning-of-semester chaos combined with a short week thanks to Labor Day. Name That Stat 📊 We kept both stats tied to this week’s topic. Jadrian offered up the total amount of money the Transportation Security Administration spent in the most recent fiscal year (https://usafacts.org/explainers/what-does-the-us-government-do/subagency/transportation-security-administration/). What started as a fairly crude response to the attacks has become part of an enormous security infrastructure that is now a normal part of flying in the United States. We then turned to financial markets. Matt offered up a measure of how much the Dow Jones fell during the first week of trading after September 11 (https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0911/how-september-11-affected-the-u.s.-stock-market.aspx). The markets were initially closed for several days after the attacks, but investors had to process an extraordinary amount of fear and uncertainty all at once when they reopened. Show Notes Before getting into a summary of this week’s episode, we want to be clear about what this episode is and what it isn’t. September 11 was first and foremost a tragedy. Thousands of people were killed, families lost loved ones, first responders made extraordinary sacrifices, and the effects of that day continue to be felt 25 years later. Talking about the attacks through an economic lens isn’t meant to reduce those lives to statistics or suggest that GDP is the measure that matters most. We believe looking at this event through an economics lense gives us one additional way to ask questions about why terrorism happens and how an event like this can reshape the economy. We started with Gary Becker’s rational model of crime. The basic idea is surprisingly intuitive: people respond to incentives even when they’re deciding whether to do something illegal (https://www.econlib.org/rational-crime-and-subjective-probability/). Someone considering a crime weighs potential benefits against the probability of getting caught and the consequences if they do. Terrorism pushes that framework to an extreme. If someone is willing to die for a cause, the usual idea of increasing the punishment suddenly doesn’t work very well. Some of Alan Krueger’s past work used economics to explain who participates in terrorism. We didn’t get to talk about it much on the episode, but one of the important takeaways is that the familiar story connecting terrorism simply to poverty doesn’t hold up particularly well (https://www.nber.org/digest/sep02/poverty-and-low-education-dont-cause-terrorism?page=1&perPage=50). From there, we turned to the economic impact of 9/11 itself (https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/02v08n2/0211rapa/0211rapa.html) and an interesting challenge of determining whether it had a small or big shock on the economy. The argument for “small shock” (https://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/1/777777190161/) focuses on the loss relative to the overall size of the U.S. economy. Businesses relocated, damaged physical capital could eventually be rebuilt, and some of the decline in industries like travel was offset by growing demand elsewhere, particularly in security and counterterrorism. The economy was also already in a recession that had begun months earlier, making it especially difficult to separate a distinct 9/11 effect from everything else happening in 2001. Zooming out makes the “big effect” argument much stronger, especially with the benefit of twenty-five years of hindsight. Travel and conventions were hit especially hard (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230100060_7), government spending on defense and security expanded (https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/911-attacks-reshaped-us-economy-security-spending-and-confidence-steve-moore-stock-market-wall-street?teaserSource=trending), the Department of Homeland Security was created (https://www.dhs.gov/history), and new security policies became part of everyday life. Fear itself also mattered economically. People pulled back from travel and other activities because they understandably perceived the risk of another attack as much higher. Some substituted driving for flying, even though driving carries greater accident risk (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3233376/). Immigration restrictions may also have reduced an important source of long-run economic growth (https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/911-and-us-immigration-policy/). These are harder effects to capture with a single GDP number because they show up over many years. And then there have also been consequences that don’t fully show up in the economic data immediately after the attacks. Research documented sharp increases in stress and alcohol consumption (https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(16)30568-2/fulltext), with psychological effects lasting well beyond the first few weeks. Those effects matter on their own, but they can also spill into the economy through health care use, productivity, and people’s ability to work. It’s a useful reminder of the limits of trying to put one number on an event this enormous. A short-run GDP estimate can tell us something, but it can’t tell us everything. It certainly can’t measure the grief and human cost experienced by the people directly affected. We ended the episode trying to determine whether the terrorists were successful. In many ways, our own behavior changed because of September 11, even if we don’t notice it often. Airport security, travel habits, government spending, privacy, and perceptions of risk all look different today. What is one change in everyday American life after 9/11 that you think has had the biggest lasting economic impact? Leave a comment and keep the conversation going. Pop Culture Corner 🍿 Jadrian’s pick was hinted at early in the episode, but now he can share that a lot of this episode’s conversation was based on Alan Krueger’s book, What Makes a Terrorist? (https://amzn.to/4xmcyUV). The book grew out of a series of lectures Krueger gave at the London School of Economics. If today’s conversation made you want to go deeper into the economics behind it, this is the natural next stop. Matt went slightly more pop-culture-y with a Game of Thrones scene involving Doran Martell and the costs of choosing war over peace (https://econthrones.com/broken-windows-fallacy/). The connection is the broken window fallacy that argues destroying useful things doesn’t make an economy wealthier just because rebuilding them later generates spending. The scene also connects nicely to the classic guns-versus-butter tradeoffm where resources devoted to war and military goods are resources that can’t simultaneously be used elsewhere. Have a question or topic idea? Reply to this email or drop it in the comments! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.econhappyhour.com (https://www.econhappyhour.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   27 Aug 2026

   Price Controls Are Popular Again

   Price controls have traditionally been a policy that economists love to use as an example of unintended consequences, but new survey data suggests voters across the political spectrum increasingly support them. We dig into why both Republicans and Democrats are warming to the idea after years of frustration with higher prices. We also walk through what economic theory and history tell us about shortages, production incentives, and the longer-run effects of price ceilings. Finally, we wrestle with a harder question for economics teachers: if students understand the model but still support the policy, what exactly should we be trying to teach? In this episode, we talk about: * Why support for price controls now crosses party lines * How years of higher grocery, housing, and energy prices may be creating “inflation fatigue” * Why price ceilings can create shortages and change producers’ behavior over time * Why understanding the economics of price controls doesn’t necessarily mean opposing them * What economics teachers can do when students understand the model but reach a different policy conclusion If you liked this conversation, you might also enjoy This Week’s Drinks 🍻 Jadrian typically joins with a beer, but this time he’s gone with a Cuba Libre Zero (https://www.bacardi.com/us/en/rum-cocktails/cuba-libre/). He’s finally taking advantage of the bar cart he was inspired to assemble by friend-of-the-show Brian O’Rourke. Matt went with a Trash Talk IPA from Yards Brewing (https://yardsbrewing.com/products/trash-talk-ipa), served in some appropriately celebratory business-school glassware. Name That Stat 📊 In what may be a first for the show, we somehow both managed to get our stats this week! Matt shared the stat that drove our episode: the share of Republicans who now say they support government price controls (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/democrats-socialism-economy-political-parties-opinion-poll/). Jadrian went with a back-to-school theme and shared the percentage of college students who say they have changed their major or concentration (https://www.axios.com/2026/08/15/college-major-ai-skills-job-search) because of job market worries. Show Notes Price controls are one of those topics that can feel almost automatic in an introductory economics class. Draw supply and demand, put a binding price ceiling below equilibrium, show the shortage, and move on to price floors. New polling data might make this topic a lot more interesting. A CBS News/YouGov poll found a majority support for price controls among Republicans, independents, and Democrats (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/democrats-socialism-economy-political-parties-opinion-poll/). That caught our attention because the partisan differences are still there, but opposition to price controls is no longer something you can neatly map onto the usual limited-government versus government-intervention divide. So what changed? Our best guess was fatigue. Consumers have spent years watching grocery bills, housing costs, gasoline, and plenty of everyday purchases get more expensive (https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-holds-steady-ahead-of-the-fed-s-september-decision-12068293). Even when inflation slows, that doesn’t mean the price level goes back to where it was before. We talked about the disconnect that creates when economists can say inflation has come down, but consumers continue to see their grocery bill is still much higher than it used to be. After enough years of that, “the government should do something about prices” starts sounding pretty appealing. From there, we went back to the basic economics of a price ceiling. If the government caps a price below the market equilibrium, consumers want to buy more while producers have less incentive to supply the product. In the short run, that creates a shortage (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-ceiling.asp). But the longer-run response may be even more important. Farmers plant less next year. Landlords invest less in maintaining apartments. Developers decide not to build. These aren’t just predictions. The U.S. has a history of wage and price controls in the 1970s (https://econ.video/2017/10/25/us-white-house-nixon-orders-a-price-freeze/) and rent control in modern days. That brought us to the part of the conversation we found most interesting: what if people understand all of that and still support the policy? Jadrian admits to seeing this in his class. Students can predict the shortage and explain how producers will respond, but then continue to support price controls on tuition or rent. It’s possible people aren’t thinking about the market-wide outcome, or they may be thinking probabilistically about themselves: “I can’t afford it now, so if the government lowers the price, maybe I’ll be one of the people who gets it.” A shortage is a cost, but it can feel like a chance at an affordable product that otherwise seems completely out of reach. That creates an important challenge for economics teachers. Hearing an economic argument once isn’t necessarily enough to overturn years of prior beliefs or personal experience. Maybe our goal shouldn’t simply be getting students to repeat that “price controls are bad.” The more interesting teaching opportunity is helping them recognize the tradeoffs, think about who actually gets the lower-priced good, and compare price controls with policies that attack the supply side of the problem. We’d love to hear how you think about this one, especially if you teach economics: if students understand why a price control creates shortages but still support the policy, what should we want them to take away from the lesson? Leave a comment and keep the conversation going. Pop Culture Corner 🍿 Jadrian’s entry comes with a Not Safe for the Classroom warning. Chris Rock has a stand-up bit that offers his own version of gun control: instead of focusing on guns, make bullets wildly expensive. If ammunition costs enough, people are going to think a lot harder about using it. It may not be the example you want to lead with in your 8 a.m. principles class, but it’s certainly a memorable way to think about how prices change behavior. Matt brought two clips this week. The first comes from the final episode of Friends (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0583433/), when the group is saying goodbye to Monica and Chandler’s apartment. Chandler reflects on what a beautiful place it was and all the great memories they made there before adding the economist-friendly punchline: because of rent control, the place was a “frigging steal.” Matt’s second pick shifts from price controls specifically to the broader affordability problem. In the opening number from his favorite movie musical (https://broadwayeconomics.com/another-day-of-sun-la-la-land/), everyone is dealing with the frustrations of trying to make it in Southern California. But, hey, at least there’s another day of sun. Of course, there’s an economics angle to that sunshine: lots of people want to live in Southern California, and all that demand shows up in housing prices. Have a question or topic idea? Reply to this email or drop it in the comments! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.econhappyhour.com (https://www.econhappyhour.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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• Eric Dunaway
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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

8 ratings

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Podcast Authority Score: 57 / 100

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Quality

85

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

71

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